Horror Show

Ruben Guerrero's plans to be a judge again are dashed, as local Democrats continue their inept ways

The past year has been a horror movie for former state district judge Ruben Guerrero. Call it Revenge of the Rich White Males.

It stars conniving lawyers and congressmen, a busybody senator and a whole host of hurt feelings, accusations and calls to arms.

While it may be a horror movie to Guerrero, for the rest of Houston it's a farce, and just another example of how inept local Democrats have become in filling the precious few patronage jobs left to the party these days.

The saga concerns the seemingly endless attempt to replace U.S. District Judge Norman Black, who announced his retirement early last year. Guerrero had the job, then it appeared he didn't; then it appeared he did, and now he most definitely doesn't.

With no Democratic Senator -- or even a dominant Congressman like Jack Brooks -- the process for filling such a slot has become convoluted and chaotic. There are five Democratic representatives from the Southern District, one of four federal districts in Texas: Ken Bentsen, Gene Green and Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston, and Solomon Ortiz and Ruben Hinojosa of South Texas. All are relatively new in their posts.

Their first attempt at filling Black's post was utterly lame: Unable to agree on a single name, they forwarded four names to President Clinton in March 1997, asking him to pick one. Informed that things don't work that way, they tried again, setting off the scramble that has degenerated into the current situation.

Green represents a district that was carved out specifically to produce a Hispanic representative; ever mindful of that, he has been single-minded in promoting Hispanics for federal slots. In the blunt math of the selection process, he has often teamed with the two South Texas representatives to get his way.

And that's what happened when the delegation announced, a week after the White House had rejected their first effort, that Guerrero was its choice. Now 51, he had been beaten in two attempts to get elected to a state district bench. Appointed to a criminal district judgeship by Ann Richards in 1993, he lost his bid to retain the seat a year later.

Guerrero never awed attorneys with his legal brilliance on the bench, but there have been worse judges. Guerrero's main problem was that he was picked for the federal job over Keith Ellison.

Legal resumes don't get much more impressive than Ellison's: summa cum laude at Harvard, editor of the law journal at Yale, a Rhodes scholar who won several academic prizes at Oxford and a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.

Ellison, who's white, is also politically savvy. Not only does he do pro bono work for immigrant refugees, he represented the local Democratic congressional delegation in its 1996 redistricting lawsuit.

In other words, he appeared to be the perfect type of candidate to be a federal judge, from the viewpoint of bigtime lawyers for whom resumes are gospel. Those are the same kind of bigtime lawyers, of course, who contribute heavily to Democratic candidates on the local and national level and who have friends and former classmates scattered throughout the political bureaucracy.

Almost immediately after Guerrero's selection was announced, a behind-the-scenes campaign to sabotage the nomination began. Since Clinton became president, perhaps ten people had been named locally as nominees for anything from U.S. marshal to federal appeals court judge (some eventually withdrew), and none had been a white male. With the Democratic Party dead in statewide offices, the federal jobs represented the only way up for ambitious lawyers seeking appointments, and resentment was slowly building as minorities and women consistently were named.

To a dedicated group of secretive lawyers, the yawning gap between the resumes of Ellison and Guerrero, a graduate of Texas Southern University's law school, was too much to take. In a departure from standard practice, the White House conducted preliminary interviews with both Guerrero and Ellison, who had been named as the delegation's pick "if Guerrero is not nominated or confirmed."

Ellison says his White House interview last August was "pretty perfunctory. I was given to believe that Ruben Guerrero's nomination would proceed and I would be recommended for consideration for another position. It was clear to me that Ruben Guerrero was their first choice."

Not for long. Green, the judge's chief supporter, says he complained for months to the White House about its seeming determination to keep Ellison's hopes alive.

Rumors began circulating that Bentsen had traded his vote on the controversial "fast-track" trade agreement in return for a White House decision to support Ellison, a charge Bentsen's office vehemently rejects.

"It's questionable how much influence [Lampson] would have as a freshman member of the minority party," he said. "Any degree of blame about this would be flattering to him, [as would] any implication that he has the power to make or break federal judges not in his district."

In reality, it's unlikely that Bentsen or Lee would bother antagonizing their congressional colleagues on Ellison's behalf. He's not tight enough with either to make it worth their while, and both are known for picking their battles cautiously.